From Hell's Heart
by BerylCoronet
Summary: Prequel to The Arrangement series. Khan meets Carol Marcus, his political bride, and plots his revenge against her father.


**From Hell's Heart**

He had been built to be better at everything. His body had crushing strength, superior visual and hearing acuity and perfect reflexes. Steel bent in his hands. His blood buzzed with nearly miraculous healing abilities. He could move without a sound and fast as a striking cobra. And his mind. His mind was ever alive, awake even as he slept, rotating at a speed humans could only dream of, always calculating, never stopping. His memory registered everything, never faltering. But none of that interested the Head of Starfleet. No, what Admiral Marcus wanted was the savage, the monster outlined by nightmares and thought lost in a past of blood-tinged fire. He wanted the warrior who could look at enemy lines – any enemy lines – and instantly see tactical weaknesses and strategic flaws and the best ways to take advantage of them.

The squeaky clean Federation refused to dirty its pristine hands with the reality of living in a world that knew threat and danger. But Marcus had found the perfect dog of war – one who lived when shouldn't. And he planned to exploit that. No amount of cajoling, attempted manipulation and pleading would move the stone-faced officer. Khan's family remained prisoner and he remained a tool to be employed in the Federation's war with the Klingons. A tool for the curiosities of Section 31's doctors. If he resisted, Marcus promised him, the admiral would do him the courtesy of letting him pick the member of his family to be subjected to the tests next. So Khan didn't resist, because for every second they were hurting him, they were not doing it to the people he held dear.

When the secret was out and he had the leverage to negotiate for his people's safety, he played the savage again, the monster from the past come to devour the children of the 23rd century. Marcus would not have just handed over his only daughter, if Khan had just asked for her as a hostage. But instead he claimed it was a tradition of his reign to seal off a new alliance with a symbolic marriage. Marcus had resisted, but it was no longer entirely up to him and Khan was too valuable for Section 31 to lose him. If Marcus thought he could just wipe them out, the second he no longer needed them, he had another thing coming, becuase the Augment would have his child, his only family. It was time the admiral felt the terror that each breath he drew would be the last for his family. He would experience first-hand what it meant to have the only person he loved in the hands of a merciless enemy.

He first saw Carol Marcus on a typical, rainy London day. She knew she was being sacrificed, flung to him like a piece of meat to the wolves, but she was trying to put up brave facade. However, she suffered from the cursed disease of naivety afflicting her optimistic time and her gaze was too honest, too open, and so he read her easily. For a moment contempt overshadowed his anger. She was as pitiful a creature as he had imagined: the sheltered child of a powerful man with stars in her eyes and juvenile ideals about her picture perfect world that had coddled her and patted her on her illusions-filled head all her life. It would be pathetically easy to reach and wrench out any delusions of paradise and safety she had been harboring under and crush them under his heel. Crush her. Mentally and once he rid himself of her father's yoke, physically as well. She would never leave the inhospitable planet, to which he was being banished. He wouldn't even bury her; he would let her lifeless husk to the lacking mercy of the elements and her bones would wither and turn to dusk in the bitter wind.

Carol Marcus thought she was being courageous and self-sacrificial, martyring herself for her sainted Federation. She had no idea. He would make sure her view of the Federation would be forever tainted, her ideals pulverized, her respect for her father gone, before he broke her spirit and in time, her bones, too. One by one. Slowly, painfully, enjoying the sweet music of her screams. Watching the light in her mismatched eyes dull and die out. Snuffing her life metaphorically, before he finally got the chance to do it literally. After all, he would make sure not to need her alive forever. He had never wanted to harm someone more than this pitiful, spoiled heiress, who was now within his grasp. His fingers itched with the desire maim and tear, as his mind computed through more sophisticated and insidious means to inflict damage. And damage he would do. Until she couldn't take it anymore and then again. And more. Always more. Always worse.

Admiral Marcus had made committed a fatal mistake in believing that Khan's needing Carol alive as a hostage would keep her safe. There were means to cause unbearable pain without laying a single finger on someone, means that left no bruise or mark, but could cut through one's psyche like a hot knife through butter. And Khan planned to wield his sharp mind as cruelly as any weapon. Marcus had wanted a savage and now it was his daughter who would have to live with him. Marcus had awoken the monster and now it would literally devour his only child. A prospect that Khan looked forward to, his heart boiling with rage and thirst for revenge. But he was also patient and able to wait as long as it took for the isolation of living alone and abandoned amid people who hated her to wear her down, to break that pretend spine. When that happened, she would come crawling to him, begging for the flimsiest of human touches, and then he would have an open pathway into her mind, to bend and twist her to his will, and use her as he saw fit against her father and against Starfleet, which had lied to him, promising them freedom, even in exile, only to snatch it from their hands and make them into slaves again.

Starfleet would pay, but above all, Marcus would pay. Khan had made the first step into his plan of vengeance by getting the admiral's daughter as a glorified prisoner. Nothing ever changed, no matter how much and how well humans lied to themselves. They always had been and would always be weak, treacherous beings, wallowing in their mediocrity and glorifying it, unable to improve themselves for real, and constantly seeking to enslave their betters, because they feared them. Perhaps he would not be able to punish them all, but he knew for a fact he could crush one of them in such a complete and perfect manner, that they would all be aware of what true superiority meant and what would be coming to them, if they touched his family again. It would not be just revenge, what he would do Carol, but also a warning, a master-piece of what he could do, if anyone were deluded enough to attempt to exploit or hold them under their thumb again. He would make an example out of Marcus' princess and he would take his time and derive enormous pleasure from it. It would be glorious and above all, memorable. Her fate would serve as statement for generations to come of what awaited humanity, if they ever meddled with forces beyond their control, and in doing so, he would ensure his family's safety and the fearsome reputation of the new empire he intended to build. An empire of order among the stars, where the meager Earth would no longer limit them.

His vows as this wedding ceremony slash treaty signing might as well have been: _To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell's heart, I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee. _As far as he was concerned, they were.

# # #

"Your new, lighter warheads work," Carol announced excitedly, as soon as he had walked into the testing ground alloted to the weapons he was building on the secret starbase Marcus had inflicted upon Khan's own planet.

Khan looked at that joyful smile that lit up her entire face and made her eyes sparkle and had to physically restrain himself from wiping it off. Instead, he silently grasped the PADD she was holding out to him and gave the readings a cursory glance. He didn't know whether Carol was indeed as brave as she thought she was, risk-addict or had merely gone insane.

"If you intend to commit suicide, Lieutenant Wallace," he said, using an icy tone and a steely voice like a precision weapon. "Consider choosing means other than my torpedoes." With that he handed her the pad back and strolled away.

He was getting to her. He knew he was. Cast away by her revered Starfleet, abandoned by her father, shunned by the personnel on the base and faced with his people's utter rejection, all alone on a hostile planet, her reserves of will-power began to dwindle and she was crumpling.

And then he had her. On the night the first baby on their new home had been born, she practically threw herself at him, her grim loneliness finally too much to bear. He knew it had less to do with desire or genuine interest and more with seeking oblivion. But still it had been a tremendous rush to have his enemy's daughter under him, clutching at him, letting him do anything he wanted to her, begging for more, whispering his name in ecstasy. Though she abandoned herself to him in order to forget her predicament, there was a strange flash in her eyes, as she gazed upon him: hesitation mixed in with regret and a softness that was both alien and familiar. She was using him, just like her father, but unlike him, she looked at him like at a person, not like an object, an experiment gone awry yet out of which one could still get some traction. Her hands were gentle, as they stroked along his skin. A note of tenderness permeated her kisses. Despite himself, he found that he yearned to soak that up. Carol might have sought him out for comfort, but she was willing to dole it out as well.

The worst part was that he wanted it. His childhood spent as as test-subject in a lab, the wars, his uneven relationship with the 23rd century, the effort of taming the recalcitrant Ceti Alpha V and the sword above his family's head, sometimes he just wished he could let go of everything and forget. It was a bit too easy to loose himself in Carol's yielding embrace and and set aside hardships and responsibility, though the voice of reason in his head warned him that thinking of her as just Carol rather than Marcus' daughter was dangerous and the trap that he had set for her had teeth that bit both ways.

**the end**


End file.
